Back in the late 20th century, though there were more important things to worry about, I was nonetheless dismissive of Liz Taylor’s designation of Michael Jackson as “King of Pop”, for the multiple reasons that: 1) that isn’t a thing; 2) even if it was, it would be lame; and also 3) even if it was a thing, it wouldn’t be Michael Jackson. Today I am amused to find a fourth reason, the best one of all. I found no fewer than two sources who aver that Henry Burr (Harry Haley McClaskey, 1882-1941) was the King of Pop. From now on, I’m going with that.
I’ll divulge those two sources at the bottom of the post, but first a few brief words on who he was before handing you off to them. Burr was a popular recording and radio artist of the years 1902 through the end of his life. Originally from Eastern Canada (New Brunswick and St. John’s), he came to New York and almost immediately put his natural singing gifts to work for the early record labels Columbia, Edison, Victor and others. Besides the name Henry Burr he also went by the aliases Irving Gillette, Henry Gillette, Alfred Alexander, Robert Rice, Carl Ely, Harry Barr, Frank Knapp, Al King, and Shamus McClaskey. At various times he sang with the Columbia Quartet (which became the Peerless Quartet) and in a duo with Albert Campbell, and various other outfits.
Burr may have sung on as many as 12,000 recordings, and had the most #1 hits of the 1910s. Some of his biggest hits were with Campbell, including “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine” (1913), “Somebody’s Waiting for Someone” (1919), “Till We Meet Again” (1919), and “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” (1919). His most successful song as a solo artist was “Just a Baby’s Prayer at Twilight” (1918), which sold over a million copies. From 1916 through 1928 he toured in vaudeville with his musical cohorts, and appeared with them in the 1928 Vitaphone short At the Club. He also got in on the ground floor of radio and was especially associated with WLS programs like the National Barn Dance.
Burr died of throat cancer in 1941 and was buried in the Kensico Cemetary in Mount Vernon, New York. It went unmarked until 2016 when William Smith organized a crowdfunding campaign to place a stone there.
Now to hand you off to those two sources!
Arthur Makosinski has been working on two definitive books about Burr (a biography and a discography) for the past 40 years, and also maintains an excellent website with much more information, available here.
And my good friends at Archeophone Records put out a wonderful album in 2005 called Anthology: The Original King of Pop Henry Burr. The blurb calls Burr “the most popular ballad singer of the first 30 years of the recording industry” — maybe more people should know his name, ya think? Get that record here.
To find out more about the history of vaudeville and artists like Henry Burr, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.